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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Goutam who wrote (84907)	1/4/2000 11:26:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1572776

Goutama, Rambus costs. So they will be permanently far more costly than standard memory by some ratio. Any guess as to where they will plateau....if ever. memory seems to be in a diaspora phase with the varieties increasing steadily and each bracnh lacks huge volume to bring costs down and in fact some branches will be made by few makers and will stay monopolistically high in price. Other players will stay out as some of the markets will be small. Looks like we may be entering an age where memory will take an ever increasong share of the system buck, even as the CPU share will fall. An alliance with Mot starts to make more sense. Bill

To: Goutam who wrote (84907)	1/4/2000 7:53:00 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1572776

Re: As to the extra costs of Rambus? Rambus achieves its increase in data rate by, in effect, interleaving 16 * 8 bit wide banks of 100MHZ DRAM. To accommodate this, it is necessary that 128 bit wide data paths be etched onto each Rambus chip. Typical SDRAM chips use 4 to 16 bit wide paths. These data paths take up around a third of the chip. The result is that rambus chips are 25% to 40% larger than SDRAM chips of the same data capacity. So they start up with an absolute cost disadvantage of that amount. This disadvantage is then increased by higher testing and packaging costs associated with rambus. On top of all of this is a Royalty fee that doesn't apply to SDRAM, only to Rambus. Rambus was a bad idea. It exchanges a 5% shrink in motherboard size for a 35% increase in silicon die size. Regards, Dan